Robert E. Brown - The Public Relations of Everything: The Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Dramatic History of an Idea

The attention lavished by PR textbooks and scholars on planning, strategy, objectives, measurement and results misleads because it fails to account for the situation of PR. PR is no less bound than any other human and social institution by contingency. Indeed, management itself is an art, as the management theorist and ethnographer Henry Mintzberg (2005) concluded after observing managers in situ. Phenomenologically, PR is an art in the service of another art.

Everyday life is contingent, notwithstanding our effort to manage it. Or, as Kierkegaard said, our effort to distract ourselves from what we know. The Big Data we overlay upon that contingency produces statistical answers that are incapable of altering the foundation of our situation or that of organizations and their managers.

The experience as experience of people doing PR has not been an interest of the vast majority of PR scholars. Why has this been so? The project of the previous generation of PR scholarship has been to lift and separate PR from its taint of moral illegitimacy and intellectual unworthiness by building a collection of theories laid upon the putative foundation of science. Meanwhile, the practice of PR has thrived largely unaware of those theories.

In the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, lived, embodied experience is the source of meaning. But quite unlike the PR adage (or enthymeme ) that perception is reality, which ignores or trivializes experience, Merleau-Ponty made embodied experience the basis of perception and consciousness, and the starting point for all philosophical explorations (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). Whats missing in much PR theory is the way in which Merleau-Ponty understood perception and experience. PR scholarship has too often been disembodied. In Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, everyday perception has merged with the aesthetic, in eye of the Cezanne (Merleau-Ponty, 1948/1964).

PRe questions the trope of the rational manager who plans, organizes and controls, which is the classic definition of management. For PRe, the assumptions of rationality run aground in a world of radical contingency, and the notion of management as a science is rebutted by the lived experience of practitioners and their managers themselves. In PRe, the compelling trope is not functionalism or mechanism or balance; it is drama.

When framed conventionally, PR becomes just another mechanical operation in the organizational wheelworks. But even the voluminous and capacious definitions of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA; see www.prsa.org) and the U.K. Chartered Institute of Public Relations voluminous and capacious definitions of PR hardly object to the idea of PR as ubiquitous.